This week I’m working on my new WIPs, since some of my old WIPs are knit up. Yeah! The two wips that I have going are the same as last week: my Melody shawl wip, and my orange Fernfrost scarf. Both are really making progress. The Melody shawl travels in my bag whenever I’m out and about and likely to have something around 10 quiet minutes where I can knit – at the doctor’s office, on the tram, on the Metro, in the car… I didn’t think I’d see this much progress by now. I thought that this would turn into one of these endless projects that linger for months, and only rarely makes progress. But I think this one will be finished up this month. Which is pretty good for me, given that I have a bunch of other things going on right now. Sorry, not the best picture – the lovely purple looks rather muddied.

I do have new pictures of the orange scarf. I was steam blocking my mystery KAL shawl (Yes, it’s finished!) and I decided to steam block part of the scarf to see how the lace pattern will look in the end, and I’m really happy with the project so far. The lace opens beautifully, and I can see that this will be a lovely long scarf. Personally, I like broader shawlish scarfs and I worked hard to convince my Mom otherwise, but Mom wanted the skinny one, like her Haruha scarf. Sigh.

Oh, and as to the reading material – it never hurts to take another look at all the camera functions. As you can see, my SLR is a Canon EOS 20D. Not the newest camera out there, but I’m pretty happy with it. The one major thing that I don’t like is that it requires CompactFlash cards. Grrr. I can’t just pop mine in the card reading slit in my camera. I usually end up taking a bunch of pictures and then I hook up an external card reader to upload the pictures. Which means that I’m usually behind with posting pictures. I then have to get my act together and organize my pictures after the fact – and that’s why there haven’t been any food pictures lately, even though I’ve been cooking quite a bit.

Btw, as to the mystery KAL – it’s finished! It didn’t have any lace components, so it was super easy to steam block it – no pinning and so on. Just easy peasy steam blocking. I only had to make sure that I didn’t stretch the edges too much and avoid uneven length/width sides. Tuesday’s post shows a bit of the finished object. Once I’ve figured out how the buttons work – i.e. what the different wear options are – I’ll do a mini photo shoot and will put up better pictures. Until then, here’s another picture of the finished project (too much sunshine, so the colors don’t look as saturated as they are):

Thank you! I think the thing that really helps me make the stitches even is a good knitting needle. I for the most part use circular needles – that way I don’t have too much weight on the needles. I also try to make sure that the needle & cable length is long enough so the knitting isn’t too scrunched up. And the join from needle to cable is really important – I hate it when stitches are snagged there. I use a Knitpicks interchangeable set and have so far been really happy with that. I also have a few ChiaGoo Red Lace needles. I really like pointy needle tips.

And the rest is just practice, really. Oh, and of course blocking – blocking fixes a lot. I’m a big fan of steam blocking – I don’t have that much space to traipse around a big wetblocked project in the middle of the room, and well, I want instant gratification.

I like skinny scarves in the summer – but since she has a hat that she’ll wear in fall and winter, I tried to convince that she needs a warm snuggly scarf. But she decided differently. At least I’ll be done faster with a skinny scarf!